A new Belgian horror project drops monsters and combat to tell a story of grief through sound.
The most effective horror often rations what it shows, pacing its reveals carefully and skipping jumpscares or graphic scenes that arrive before the dread has had time to build. A good horror story, in fact, grows out of that build-up itself: ambiguous signals, sometimes misread, a mounting sense of unease, paranoia that creeps in. Bad Choices Loud Noises and Duckosaurus Games unveiled their new project, Impermanence, during the Future Games Show Summer Showcase 2026, and it seems to bet on exactly that.
Voice actors Troy Baker and Alix Wilton Regan hosted the showcase, which aired on June 6 during Summer Game Fest week and lined up more than forty titles and a dozen world premieres, closing with the long-awaited extended gameplay reveal for Exodus. Amid names that leaned hard into action and production scale – Ace Combat 8, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced, the new Tomb Raider – Impermanence carved out a tiny space of its own: two minutes of silence, dark stage lights, a father talking to an empty theatre.
The game, currently in active development for PC and targeting a 2027 release, puts players in the shoes of a grieving scientist. Every night he returns to the Orpheum theatre – abandoned, condemned, yet not dead enough to stop him – carrying boxes of toys, photographs, trophies, drawings. Fragments of a life he’s trying to piece back together under the stage’s dead lights, in the son’s room he’s rebuilding piece by piece.
He tells himself it’s science, and that science will let him fix things.
A Dangerous Bargain
Through sound, the protagonist starts pulling something back out of the silence. Small motes of light appear in the air. Echoes answer his voice. But something else, in the dark of the theatre, starts listening too – and starts answering back.
In the announcement trailer, the first real jolt comes from a tiny, and precisely for that reason unsettling, image: a moth lands on the machine’s controls, and the game subtitles its buzzing as if it were genuine speech, in a visual register that echoes, in tone, the eldritch imagery of Control. It’s the first sign that the force working against the protagonist isn’t a monster in the classic sense, but something older and more impersonal: the universe’s own drive to restore a balance that someone chose to tamper with and break.
Impermanence states its nature from the start: no weapons, no creatures lurking in the dark, only the slow realization of a world correcting a mistake.
The Real Science Behind the Magic
One detail caught my attention as I dug a bit past the press release: acoustic levitation, the game’s central mechanic, isn’t purely science-fiction dressing. Real lab technology can do this: high-intensity ultrasonic waves create a standing wave, and at specific points called nodes, that wave balances gravity exactly, letting small objects hover in mid-air without any contact. Researchers use this real technique today to handle microchips or fragile samples in industrial and lab settings.
Knowing that a verifiable physical principle sits behind the game’s most dreamlike image – motes of light drifting through the air of an abandoned theatre – adds a whole extra layer to the story. The protagonist applies a rigorous scientific method to a problem no science can solve, and the game seems to plant its horror right in that gap, between the rigor of the process and the absurdity of the goal.
Acoustic Levitation and Shrines of Memory
On the gameplay side, the project’s core sits right here: players use acoustic levitation principles to attract and stabilize fragments of presence – residual traces of the lost son’s spirit. The experience builds its other pillar around this mechanic: creating an actual shrine of memory out of the child’s belongings. What you choose to place, and where, determines the answers you get from the world – a system that literally ties the act of remembering to a gameplay consequence.
The main features announced so far:
- Acoustic levitation that attracts and locks spirit fragments in place
- Building a shrine from a child’s belongings, with direct consequences for the story
- A conflict fought entirely through light, sound, and entropy, with no combat
- Psychological horror that leans on tension and emotional unease, with no gore
- Multiple endings that depend on how far you’re willing to go – and what you’re willing to lose
The developers are upfront about content too: the game deals with grief, death, disturbing imagery, and supernatural tension, but openly states it contains no explicit sexual content or graphic gore.
A Genre Getting More Crowded – and More Necessary
This isn’t the first time a video game has chosen grief as its central narrative material rather than mere backstory. In recent years the medium has built a small niche of its own around this theme, and each title has approached it differently. That Dragon, Cancer told, almost like an interactive diary, the terminal illness of a son as the creators themselves lived through it; Spiritfarer turned caring for the dying into a warm, colourful management game; What Remains of Edith Finch used the family house as a vessel for fragmented memories, each one ending in a different death; Gris entrusted the entire journey through grief to color-based abstraction, without a single line of dialogue. More recently, Before Your Eyes literally tied the player’s own eye blinks to the irreversible passage of memories, turning the act of looking itself into a tool for grief.
Impermanence fits into this lineage, but it picks the least travelled road of them all: it stays firmly inside horror, and it uses the genre’s own tools – tension, isolation, the feeling that someone is always watching – to show how destructive a refusal to accept loss can become. That’s a riskier bet than the titles above, almost all of which guide the player toward some form of peace. Here, instead, the danger is real, and the game seems to ask not “how do you process grief” but “what happens to someone who refuses to.” A title that picks this road always risks reducing pain to mere atmospheric window dressing. But the decision to cut combat and gore, and to build everything around a quotidian, aching gesture like assembling a shrine from a child’s belongings, suggests the developers know exactly what they want to avoid – and, ultimately, who they want to set themselves apart from.
Who’s Behind the Project
Two independent Belgian studios with very different histories stand behind Impermanence. Bad Choices Loud Noises is a brand-new studio, founded specifically to make atmospheric, emotionally dense experiences with a strong audiovisual identity – Impermanence is, in effect, its calling card. Duckosaurus Games, based in Ghent, brings a much broader background to the project: the team includes veterans who worked on titles like Koira, Gears of War, Knack 1 & 2, Hubris, and Horizon Zero Dawn – a mix of AAA, indie, and animation experience that promises real care for character work and staging.
This collaboration follows a clear logic: a fresh, highly specific authorial vision on one side, solid technical experience to support it on the other. In the indie scene, small debut studios often team up with more seasoned developers for exactly this reason – and when it works, the result combines authorial ambition with a level of technical execution that would otherwise take years to reach.
The team is currently developing gameplay systems, narrative structure, visual direction, and sound design. There’s still no precise date beyond the 2027 window.
In Closing
There’s something honest about how Impermanence presents itself to the world, betting everything on slow unease, on the sense – far harder to stage than any monster – that the world itself is rowing against someone who refuses to let go of what they’ve lost. Horror without combat and without jumpscares lives or dies on its ability to hold tension through atmosphere alone. When it works, though, this kind of horror sticks in a player’s mind longer than an actual scare does – much like it does in films of the same genre.
A father who keeps returning, night after night, to a place that should have stayed shut forever – that’s a strong image, and it builds both interest and empathy. It’s one of the most recognizable gestures in grief narratives: returning obstinately to a place, even knowing there’s nothing left to recover. Impermanence seems to take that obstinacy seriously, without judging it and without redeeming it easily.
For now, it remains to be seen whether the Orpheum theatre can carry that promise all the way through.
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